


Better with Three

by ishie



Category: Leverage
Genre: 100-1000 Words, 2010, Community: help_haiti, Ficlet, Multi, One Shot, request
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-11
Updated: 2010-02-11
Packaged: 2017-10-07 04:26:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/pseuds/ishie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It isn't that Parker doesn't understand what's happening.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Better with Three

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sinstralpride](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinstralpride/gifts).



> **Prompt: **curtainfic, OT3
> 
> Written for Sin for her donation to help_haiti. Sorry this took so freaking long! D: It's kind of pre-curtainfic but with, like, actual curtains, I guess.

It isn't that Parker doesn't understand what's happening. She's not dumb. Or innocent, or unfeeling, or any of the other labels she's been stuck with over the years. She just gets confused sometimes by people and flirting and what Sophie calls "healthy human interaction".

Hardison and Eliot have always been pretty straightforward: Hardison with his softly voiced _Call me Alec_s and chasing her around the world; Eliot offering up steel carabiners and deep bowls of macaroni and cheese that don't come from a box. But for all of that, she _doesn't understand what's happening._

She did the slinky dress thing. The high heels. The tank tops with no Army jackets over them. Pretending to need to bend at the waist eighty times a day. Dropping her knife, devising escapes that required tight spaces and tighter grips, suggesting late night movie marathons where she curled up against a hard shoulder.

And all of it was a complete waste of time. So, instead, Parker goes for the throat, the way she wanted to from the start.

When Hardison passes her one of the curtains he's insisting he needs her opinion on - even though they all know that Sophie would actually have an opinion to voice in place of Parker's disinterested mumbling - she asks, "Shouldn't we already be at the part where we're having sex?"

Sometimes when he's really surprised, he makes a noise that's a kind of a cross between a teakettle and an engine that won't turn over. He's making it now.

Eliot, on the other hand, doesn't look over from where he's checking his hair in the nearest reflective surface.

"Waitin' for you to make up your mind," he says.

Now Parker gets it. It isn't often that she's way out ahead of the rest of the group when it comes to thinking things through. But on this? On this, she's _years_ ahead of them.

It's cute how dumb they are sometimes.

"Nothing to make up my mind _about_," she insists, watching them both to make sure they understand what she's saying.

Eliot does, right away. He turns enough to smirk at her and say, "Well, then."

"Wait," is just about all Hardison can say for almost two minutes. He keeps repeating it and then standing with his mouth hanging open, looking back and forth between them like he's waiting for them to crack. One of his hands is clenched in the sample drapes hanging from a sturdy bar screwed into the wall a few feet over his head. "Wait, what?"

"I'm Rose, you're the Doctor, and he's Jack," Parker says.

"Yeah, but-"

"Fanon, not canon." As it turns out, maybe all those months weren't entirely wasted after all, because Hardison gets _that_ immediately.

"Damn, why didn't you _say_ so?"

Parker's not entirely sure what she thought would happen next, but it wasn't giggling as Hardison tried to explain to an irate store clerk how he ripped the bar clean off the wall. It wasn't doubling over with laughter as Eliot tried to free himself and an innocent bystander from the yards of heavy fabric that enveloped them.

Puttiing herself between them with a hand on each of their chests to stop them from brawling right in the middle of the store - that's a little closer to what she thought would happen.

They'll get to the rest of it, eventually.


End file.
